SchlagerBlog

Teachers everywhere are gearing up for the start of the new school year. Judging from the tweets I’m seeing from all the history teachers I follow on Twitter, technology is a big concern. What tools should we incorporate into the classroom? How do we engage students in Web-based research? How do we interact with other educators around the globe and learn from what they are doing? From Google Docs to Web-based syllabi to Twitter and Facebook, educators are spending significant time and energy on finding ways to transform the classroom experience for their students and for themselves. Of course, I recognize that teachers who use Twitter are by default likely to be the most interested in using technology to further classroom instruction (”tech ed”).  Still, it’s clear that these educators are the pioneers in a trend that is irreversible. The strategies that they develop in tech ed will eventually be adopted by virtually all teachers everwhere. Technology is only going to be more ubiquitous in our lives as time goes on, and–just as crucial–students will increasingly demand an educational experience that is infused with technological tools and possibilities.

Because we are in the midst of reimagining how we deliver our own content to teachers and students via the Web (I’m referring to the site redesign that is in progress for MilestoneDocuments.com, and the iPhone apps we are developing), I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. And it seems that everywhere I turn these days, other people are thinking and writing about it as well. The article in this month’s Fast Company magazine about how “edupunks” are reinventing higher education through the use of online learning tools at very low cost has gotten a lot of attention in educational and technology circles. Likewise, history educators far and wide are blogging about how they are using technology (see The History Teacher’s Attic and Thinking in Mind for just 2 examples) in new and innovative ways. As often happens, a few select voices are making an outsized contribution. Witness Russell Tarr, a U.K. educator whose Active History site is innovating with gaming and other social Web tools and who has almost singlehandedly built an international networkof history educators via Twitter. (Just search on the #historyteacher hashtag in Twitter to see what I mean.)

Of course,  all the technological bells and whistles mean nothing if student achievement and learning aren’t also being transformed. As the educational consultant Peter Pappas pointed out in this blog post from last month:

“Learning must engage student in rigorous thinking at higher levels of Bloom - analyzing, evaluating and creating.”

Helping students with those very things–analyzing and evaluating primary sources as a way to better understand history–is our entire focus with our Milestone Documents series of reference books and MilestoneDocuments.com. And there is no doubt that in many classrooms around the country, students and educators are engaging with exactly this kind of higher-level learning process. However, far too many classrooms are nowhere near this ideal, either. Recently, managing editor Andrea Betts and I visited an inner-city Dallas high school recently and saw the hallway walls lined with simple posters that the students had created. There were posters about the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, and other major primary documents from U.S. history. “This is great to see,” we thought at first. But then Andrea asked the question: “Why are high school students spending their time making posters? Why aren’t they writing lengthy papers (or even short ones, but a lot of them), putting together sophisticated presentations, and the like?” We don’t know that some of this wasn’t happening, but my gut tells me that it wasn’t. I suspect that the “rigorous thinking at higher levels” that Peter Pappas referred to in his blog post was far from the minds of the teachers and administrators at this school. They were probably more focused on keeping kids in school (the dropout rate at the school was above 50%) and imparting some basic level of knowledge hoping that more kids might pass the state exams.

Which brings me back to the use of technology in the classroom. If ever the moment was ripe for a paradigm shift in educational instruction methods–at all levels of learning–it is now. The Internet, social media, and open source tools are indeed revolutionizing entire sectors of society and business (one example: publishing). How do we use them to reinvent history education in particular, and education in general? Is there a way to use them to close the achievement gap for the worst-performing schools and students? And where is the innovation going to come from–will it come from inside the public school system, from teachers, from charter schools, from new forums for online learning?

Certainly I don’t have the answers to these questions. But it’s a hopeful sign to see so many stakeholders thinking about these issues. Our kids deserve a better educational experience than they have been getting.

Arnold Markoe, the editor in chief of the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, sent me the text of a wonderful letter by Harry S. Truman to Paul Hume, music critic of the Washington Post. Hume had made the mistake of criticizing Truman’s daughter, Margaret. Can anyone imagine a modern president writing anything so angry and rash?

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

Dec. 6, 1950

Mr. Hume:

I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come
to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer
pay.”

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he
could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was
in the back section of the paper you work for it shows
conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your
ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new
nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter
below!

Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope
you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection
on your ancestry.

H.S.T.

We are about a week away from publication of our second title, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. The mad dash to the finish line partially explains my silence on this blog over the past few weeks. Today I’m flying to Newark for a sales presentation about the set to our distributor, Salem Press. It’s a great opportunity to offer my vision for the set and the series in general, and it’s a good excuse to brush up on my PowerPoint skills.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some work to get the data for American Leaders in final, pristine XML shape for the electronic database that purchasing libraries get for free, Salem History. (And big news on this front: we’re offering an exclusive online article about Barack Obama’s speeches and writings for those libraries that buy the print set.) While doing that, I’ve realized that there are a number of April birth anniversaries for people covered in our set. Yesterday (April 22), for instance, was the anniversary of Robert Oppenheimer’s birth. (It was also the anniversary of George Washington’s influential Proclamation of Neutrality , which was our Doc of the Day at the Milestone Documents Blog.) Today is the anniversary of the births of both James Buchanan and Stephen A. Douglas, while Saturday is the anniversary of William Brennan’s birth. Next week sees birth anniversaries for Ulysses S. Grant (April 27) and James Monroe (April 28), while we’re just past the anniversaries for folks like Colin Powell (April 5), Allen Dulles (April 7), Frances Perkins (April 10), Henry Clay (April 12), Thomas Jefferson (April 13), and Roger Sherman (April 19).

We are in the early stages of a badly needed site redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com, and one of the things the redesign will accomplish is integration of the content from American Leaders with the content already in place from Milestone Documents in American History. And, above all, we will move closer to making the site an essential stop for information about famous primary documents in U.S. and world history. There is so much exciting stuff happening around the use of primary sources in the classroom, and we look forward to being a bigger part of that conversation in the months and years to come. Stay tuned for more news about our site redesign and new product offerings for students, teachers, and libraries.

Hello again after a long absence. We’re in the final stages of production on Milestone Documents of American Leaders, so it’s been a challenge to lift my head up to think about blogging. The launch of a new publication is always exciting, and this time is no different. Our distribution partner, Salem Press, is readying a direct-mail piece about the title, advertisements will be appearing in upcoming issues of Library Journal and Booklist, and Ingram (a wholesaler) has selected MDAL as of its upcoming “Reference Premier Picks.” And later this month, managing editor Andrea Betts and I will be at the Texas Library Association annual conference giving out free Black History Month posters to all attendees. If you plan to attend TLA, please stop by the Salem Press booth to get your free poster!

The editor in chief of MDAL, Paul Finkelman, has some exciting news to share:  next week he’ll be giving the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His topic is “The Supreme Court and the Peculiar Institution: Marshall, Story, Taney, and the Defense of Slavery.” The 3 Supreme Court justices named in the title–John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Roger Taney–are of course featured in MDAL.

Meanwhile, our Doc of the Day over at the Milestone Documents Blog today is the Truman Doctrine. As it happens, I just started reading David McCullough’s Truman. I’m only 50 pages in, which means that I have a mere 950 to go! Luckily, McCullough is a writer of uncommon grace and intelligence, so the read will be an enjoyable one.

It’s Presidents Day here in the U.S. and a holiday for us at Schlager Group. Many of you have probably seen the news of the latest ranking of presidential leadership by 65 historians conducted by C-Span. No surprise that Lincoln is at the top (followed by Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Truman); at the bottom is James Buchanan. There has been a lot of interest in where George W. Bush would fall in this survey: he comes in as the seventh worst. I wonder how this position will change in future surveys?

Meanwhile, we continue to see a lot of traffic at our “milestone inaugural addresses” page over at MilestoneDocuments.com. I assumed that the traffic would fall to a more normal level pretty quickly after Obama’s swearing-in, but that’s not the case so far. It would appear that plenty of teachers and students are still studying the great addresses from the past.

I’ve spent some time this weekend going through various history periodicals, and I wanted to highlight two articles of interest. First, the February 2009 issue of the OAH Newsletter features an article by James Percoco titled “Doing What I Do.” Jim is the consulting editor for our forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders; in his spare time, he teaches history at West Springfield High School in Virginia, gives history education workshops, teaches part-time at American University, and leads history groups on overseas trips. The article offers an interesting glimpse at the busy life of our country’s best history educators. For Milestone Documents of American Leaders, Jim wrote eight detailed Teacher Activity Guides; although anyone with access to the print set (and free online database) will be able to get these guides for free, we will also make them available as an e-document for immediate download on Amazon.com, just as we did with the activity guides from Milestone Documents in American History.

In the January 2009 issue of Historically Speaking, the bulletin of the Historical Society, renowned historian Theodore K. Rabb has written an article titled “Teaching World History: Problems and Possibilities.” (Sorry: the article doesn’t appear to be available online.) Rabb remarks that although the teaching of world history at the middle school and high school levels has increased since the World History Association was founded in 1982 (in well over half the states, students must take one year of world history in order to graduate from high school), that teaching has encountered many difficulties. These problems include differing standards from state to state as well as poorly articulated and unreasonably ambitious goals. A fundamental issue is simply the enormity of it all: how do you possibly do justice to the vast sweep of history across multiple civilizations and eras in the short amount of time available? Not surprisingly, many secondary school world history courses become a mad dash through the highlights, one that never allows teachers to pause at any one place or time to truly engage their students. Rabb calls for a relaxing of the notion that every world history class must cover all of human  history, saying “it is a chimera at best, and imposes a needless burden.” He continues:

Within an overall structure, there has to be room for a class to take off a week here and there in order to dig more deeply into Renaissance Florence or Ming Beijing, the encounters of conquistadors and colonists with Native Americans, or the golden age of Timbuktu. Unless the endeavors of individuals and peoples are exposed in some detail, it will be impossible to suggest why history can be so appealing.

Indeed, there are so many fascinating stories to tell from world history. We’ve encountered that same dilemma while putting the finishing touches on our entry list for Milestone Documents in World History. It’s good to see our leading historians and educators continually grappling with how to improve history education.

As you probably know, today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And how strange that it’s also the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday.) To mark the occasion, we’ve adapted the entry on Lincoln in our forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders and inserted it into a post at the Milestone Documents Blog. The entry was written by Paul Finkelman, a renowned Lincoln scholar and the executive editor of our Milestone Documents series. As many others have observed, the man who is perhaps our greatest president was also our greatest writer-president, and so it’s especially appropriate that we mark his birthday here in the Milestone Documents universe.

Speaking of that universe, the same abridged Lincoln entry also appears in our latest newsletter. The article had to compete for space with a number of other items on the February history calendar, including Black History Month and Era 8 of the National History Standards (Great Depression and World War II). Meanwhile, the fun never stops: We’re hard at work on our fall title, Milestone Documents in World History, and you’ll be seeing some news soon related to that publication.

I recently watched the 6-part BBC/PBS series “The Story of India.” Aside from being wonderfully entertaining and informative, the series got me thinking about ways in which educational publishers might adapt so that we could better meet the needs of students in the future.

First, consider some of these hallmarks of the India series:

• It was broadcast in high-definition TV
• It told the story of the past through the present–contemporary sites, scenes, and people were all used to illustrate past events
• It used a single, compelling person as the guide (in this case, the historian Michael Wood)
• It mixed in some very useful didactic tools, including superb maps and geographical animations and, very cleverly, clips from Bollywood films to illustrate key events (rather than lame re-creations, as has become the norm in so much history television)
• It offered a companion Web site complete with terrific photos, video snippets, and a social media component
• It offered a companion book
• Above all, it told a great story

In short, the series represented a multimedia, multichannel entertainment offering that brilliantly told a history lesson and that made a sprawling, complex narrative accessible and digestible.

For educational publishers in general and history publishers in particular, the take-aways are many. First, it has been clear for years that video and audio are playing an increasing role in students’ lives. While as publishers we must remain focused on what we do best–generally that means publishing written content–that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also explore ways to incorporate video and audio content. To be sure, many publishers are already doing this. But the advent of high-def video, the development of video tools/sites like YouTube, and the fact that video/audio production can now be done fairly inexpensively increases the options for content producers. In the future, history publishers need to find ways to offer related video/audio content.

At the same time, publishers have only begun to tap the possibilities of digital history–using the Web in innovative ways to reach students and teachers. While I wouldn’t say that the companion Web site for “The Story of India” offers any great lessons on this front (e.g., its social Web component was too unfocused), nonetheless I think that a robust Web site–even for a single niche product offering–can be extremely beneficial in attracting and building an audience.

Finally, what comes to mind are partnerships.  It may well be true that many publishers lack the resources and expertise to take advantage of the full range of multimedia/multichannel opportunities. If so, then we should seek out other companies to partner with–ones that can bring expertise that we may be lacking.

I wonder how many history teachers will use “The Story of India” in their classrooms, even in part? (It’s hard to see how they would have the time to use the full 6 parts, especially in the case of AP World History classes, for instance.) Nonetheless, it would make a brilliant teaching tool.  I wish I had had something as visually arresting and compelling to watch when I was in school. Today’s students are perhaps more used to such programs, and their expectations for all sorts of media–video, audio, book, online–are no doubt higher as a result.

It was an odd ALA Midwinter meeting in Denver this past weekend. Attendance was down sharply, and as a result the traffic on the convention floor was quite lackluster–especially in the nether regions of the floor where some of the smaller presses had their booths. This included Salem Press, which is where our titles are showcased. Traffic was a little better in the center of the floor at the big booths–Gale, ProQuest, EBSCO, and so forth. Now that EBSCO has purchased Salem, they might have better proximity to the hub at future conferences.

Leaving aside the issue of traffic, these conventions have evolved into a place where vendors do business with other vendors, while showing off their products to librarians on the side. Librarians no longer make purchases on the convention floor, so one of the original justifications for vendors to exhibit their products has all but disappeared. It’s not hard to see why some vendors are choosing not to exhibit at some of these conventions.

For me, it was still a very useful conference, as I had excellent discussions with Salem about our partnership and the promotion of our upcoming titles.  I was disappointed that Milestone Documents in American History did not make the RUSA list of oustanding reference sources, but I feel certain that our future titles will be strong candidates for this award. It was fun to run into Lee Lerner at the convention, in between his ski outings.

Two items to comment on with regard to the Milestone Documents Blog. First, the American Historical Association Blog has taken notice of our historians’ roundup of Obama’s inaugural address. Second, this morning we posted the full text of Obama’s recent executive orders regarding the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and “ensuring lawful interrogations.”

Now that we are a day removed from Obama’s inaugural speech, I wanted to share my thoughts about it. At first, I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. There was very little in the way of soaring rhetoric and linguistic flourishes. And let’s be honest: I think a lot of us were hoping for that (I certainly was).

However, upon further reflection, I think the speech was entirely appropriate. It was if Obama said, “I know you want entertainment and high-fallutin wordplay, but I’m not going to give it to you. We have bigger and more important things to discuss and focus on.” That’s not to say that beautiful language and serious messages are mutually exclusive, but rather that Obama seemed intent on presenting a clear, consise, simple, and serious message: the years of immaturity and imprudence, both at home and abroad, are over. It’s now time for us to step up to the plate and do better.

Here are some highlights of the speech for me:

• No conflict between our ideals and our safety. Like many Americans, I have been appalled at the way we have prosecuted the wars these past 8 years. Torture, secret prisons, monitoring the conversations of American citizens. Obama signaled very clearly that these practices will end. I hope he means it. We are better than this. We can do better than this.
• It’s time for us to grow up. A huge reason for Obama’s political rise, I think, is that from the beginning he has spoken as an adult and treated the American people as adults. In his inaugural address he addressed that theme explicitly, saying that our childish ways must end. From economic crisis to environmental destruction to terrorism to human rights, the threats facing us are too severe for our country to continue to stick its head in the sand and go about our merry way. We all know that we MUST transform the way we live. Obama knows it too, and I hope he holds us to it.
• Our founding documents can lead the way. In all respects, Obama noted, our country’s milestone documents can point the way forward. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, our great body of law and legal opinions–these are at the heart of our national strength and should continue to guide our actions.

In the end, none of us wanted a pretty speech just for its own sake. When I think of the speeches of Georgh H. W. Bush, for instance, I think mainly of the phrase “a thousand points of light.” It’s a beautiful, poetic metaphor, and yet, with all due respect to the first President Bush, in the end it meant nothing–it had no impact on policy or national action. While some pundits are saying that Obama’s speech had nothing in it that will be memorable in 100 years, I think this is totally premature. If Obama succeeds in spearheading the national transformation that he spoke about, then people WILL look to his speech as one of the greats–I’m convinced of it. We don’t even demand or expect that transformation to take place immediately, and in fact we all know that’s impossible. All we really hope for is for the country to make a turn and start heading in the right direction. That would replace a thousand beautiful speeches.

Our offices are closed today to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. The intersection of MLK Day and Obama’s inauguration makes for a heady mix, as innumerable others are noting. On Tuesday, as Obama is sworn in and gives his inaugural address, the staff and I will be huddled around a computer watching via live Web streaming. I’m somewhat concerned that Net traffic will overwhelm the various servers and we’ll find ourselves out of luck; let’s hope that’s not the case. Later in the week, on the Milestone Documents Blog, I will post a historians’ roundup of the address. And one of our historian colleagues, Chester Pach, will be immediately setting to work on writing a complete analysis of the address. By March, this entry should be loaded on Salem History, where all libraries that purchased Milestone Documents in American History (and their patrons) will be able to access it for free. In addition, we’ll make it available via MilestoneDocuments.com and Amazon.com. Coming in April to those same venues, also from Chester Pach, will be analysis of Obama’s other key speeches, including his 2004 convention speech, 2008 speech on race, and his election-night address in Chicago’s Grant Park.

Speaking of inaugural addresses, we’ve wrapped up our countdown of the top 5 addresses in history at the MD Blog. I’ve heard that one sure way to bump up your blog traffic is do to a top 5 or top 10 list. While our traffic wasn’t exactly server-busting, it did show a nice spike indeed. The list was anything but scientific, of course, but it was nonetheless fun and illuminating.

Twitter grows on me. I’m finding it eases the pressure on blogging; I don’t feel like a loser when I don’t blog for days at a time, because now there is Twitter to use for quick posts and links and observations, all of which take only a few seconds. Andrea Betts wants me to display more wit and humor on this blog; I think she has me confused with someone who is witty and humorous. Nonetheless, I do think that having Twitter will make this blog better, and that’s something I hadn’t counted on.

And so we await Tuesday, and the inauguration of Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president. The time that has elapsed since election day in November hasn’t made it any less astonishing or inspiring. He’s given some pretty amazing speeches in his time, but my guess is that he’s reserved something special for this occasion. Let’s see.